Early last year when the coronavirus struck, tens of thousands of San Franciscans, like so many others across the globe, suddenly couldn’t pay rent. City leaders made sure that state and federal safety nets had plenty of backup; pretty much everyone agreed that no one should lose their home in a pandemic.
But the virus is receding (we hope) in fits and starts, and those emergency protections are starting to recede as well. On Oct. 1, California lifted its pandemic moratorium on non-payment evictions.
This week, SF officials preserved through the end of 2021 a local hold on most kinds of evictions, but tenants can now be evicted for failure to pay rent.
Landlords are not required to file nonpayment evictions with the San Francisco Rent Board, but its director Robert Collins tells The Frisc: “It has generally been accepted and corroborated by legal defense organizations that the vast majority of eviction attempts are for nonpayment of rent.”
So far, a predicted eviction tsunami, sweeping renters into the streets in record numbers, has not materialized. Renters may have breathing room for the moment; nevertheless, the pandemic has shaken the city like a snow globe. It’s forced the reassessment of everything from its bureaucracy and shared public spaces to the transit system.
Some of these changes are welcome and refreshing, but they pale in the face of the city’s seemingly intractable crises — such as its self-inflicted housing shortage and persistent homelessness problem, to name just two.
These are difficult issues to address and unpack, but with schools and some businesses back up and running, the city can start looking beyond COVID and ask crucial questions. Here’s one: Should SF, which by recent counts is about two-thirds renters, also reassess its eviction rules?
San Francisco has long stood for protecting the rights of tenants. Its form of rent control came in the late 1970s, and other measures have accrued over decades, leading to one of the lowest eviction rates among U.S. cities in recent years. The Frisc reached out to tenant advocates, landlord associations, and elected officials to take stock of eviction policy before COVID, and ask what lessons this unprecedented period can teach us for the future.
A brief history of protection
In 1979, the city enacted its rent stabilization ordinance and required that landlords provide a “just cause” for almost all evictions. While rent control only applies to buildings built before that year, just cause protections apply to all apartments.
Among the changes that have come since, the rent ordinance was extended in 1994 to owner-occupied buildings of four units or less. During the last decade, the Board of Supervisors banned evictions for minor infractions of landlords’ rules and allowed tenants to add roommates.
In 2018, the Eviction Lab project tallied eviction rates across the nation. It acknowledged plenty of caveats — such data are notoriously difficult to pin down — and reported that San Francisco had a rate of 0.25% in 2016. Even if off by some margin, it would still be one of the lowest in the state, if not the country.
Tenant advocates fired back, arguing that the project had undercounted evictions by more than 50 percent. More protection was necessary, they said, and SF’s voters agreed: In 2018, Proposition F prevailed, giving anyone facing eviction the right to free legal counsel. Prop F was authored by Tenants Together founder Dean Preston, who would go on to win the District 5 supervisor seat in 2019. (The Tenant Right to Counsel program established by the proposition was not fully funded until this summer.)
Today, Sup. Preston agrees that SF’s protections are better than those in many other cities, but says there were gaps before the pandemic, many due to state laws that can’t be overridden. Before COVID, California landlords were able to evict tenants who were just three days late on rent. (In Vermont, for comparison, rent has to be 30 days late before landlords can take action.) That’s not allowed under emergency measures; tenants who have applied for rental assistance can stay in their homes even if they’re behind on rent. But that allowance expires March 31, 2022. Landlords will also be able to sue tenants for unpaid rent starting Nov. 1.
State law has also prevented actions against Ellis Act evictions — which landlords use to clear a building, either to exit the rental business or to change its use, like a conversion to condominiums. All that being said, evictions between April 2020 and April 2021 were down 50 percent from the previous year, according to the SF Rent Board.
As to the predicted tsunami after the Oct. 1 end of the moratorium? Max Barnes, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, tells The Frisc that there have only been two nonpayment eviction filings since the beginning of October, and that both households are being represented by the city’s free Tenant Right to Counsel (TRC) program, which was established by Prop. F in 2018. In other words, the regulations are by and large working — for the moment.
Getting to zero
When the rest of the emergency protections on eviction expire, the pre-pandemic rules will return. Should they?
Preston says no, San Francisco should not return to the old status quo: “The goal should be to get to zero evictions citywide.” When asked if that includes renters posing a health or safety risk — so-called nuisance tenants — who even under the pandemic moratorium could be legally evicted, Preston replies that eviction should never be the first tool used.
Charley Goss, a representative of the San Francisco Apartment Association, counters that landlords should have some leeway. “We’re not a pro-eviction group,” he says, “but we recognize that there are instances where it’s needed.”
Balancing tenants’ and landlords’ rights has been a contentious topic in the state legislature, according to David Chiu, who represented SF in the state Assembly for seven years but is coming back to become city attorney. It’s a reminder that much of tenant-landlord law gets decided in Sacramento, and San Francisco can only do so much.
Permanent relief
State Sen. Scott Wiener, another SF representative in the state’s capital, laments the state limits on San Francisco’s ability to expand tenant protections. He tells The Frisc that he and other legislators sought to extend California’s eviction moratorium. “It is to everyone’s detriment when people are unstable in their housing,” Wiener says.
Wiener would like to see better long-term rent assistance from the state and federal governments, like the low-income rent subsidies that might end up in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. (San Francisco had its own emergency rental relief, but it was folded into the state program in September.)
These rental assistance programs are great. If my tax dollars are going to help somebody keep a roof over their head, I’m perfectly fine with that.
Steve Wasserman, SF landlord and property manager
Goss seconds this, and says a permanent program would benefit renters and owners alike. As of June, SF’s tenants had accrued between $150 million and $350 million in rental debt since March 2020, according to a report from the city Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office. What’s more, when renters gave up apartments (as indicated by the drop in rental prices, which are down 20% from March 2020), many landlords struggled to fill their units while mortgages and property taxes and other costs still had to be covered. This combination of factors “left property owners in a really tough position,” the SFAA’s Goss says.
“There’s a perception that if you own property in San Francisco, you’re the Monopoly man with the mustache,” Goss comments. “Whereas really many people are operating 100-year-old buildings [which are subject to rent control] and not getting much rent for it and working day jobs.”
Helpful as rent relief has been, there have been snags and delays. As of Oct. 18, San Franciscans had applied for more than $200 million, but just over a quarter of those funds had been disbursed, according to the SF Public Press rent relief tracker.
Shanti Singh, communications and legislative director at Tenants Together, says that the longer it takes for everyone to receive their money, the more likely unlawful evictions become. If landlords get more frustrated, they might be more motivated to simply get rid of the tenants, “and that’s bad for everybody,” she notes.
One landlord, albeit not a mom-and-pop operator, is Steve Wasserman, a principal of property management company Vertex and owner of 10 SF apartment buildings. He says that he has applied for rent relief for dozens of his tenants, and it’s been a big help, although some payments have taken months to arrive.
Wasserman tells The Frisc that as a rule, he does not evict tenants. He also says that if a Vertex client was set on evicting a tenant, his company would end its management contract with that landlord.
“I think these rental assistance programs are great,” Wasserman says. “If my tax dollars are going to help somebody keep a roof over their head, I’m perfectly fine with that.”
It’s a horrible situation that led us here, but it’s a good thing that these eviction bans and rent relief programs have so dramatically reduced displacement.
Sup. Dean Preston
So what could a long-term rent relief program look like? Preston says that smaller nonemergency programs already exist — The Rental Assistance Disbursement Component (RADCo), for example, aids tenants in debt with interest-free loans, provided the debt is due to a “temporary financial setback.”
A permanent version of the COVID rent-relief program is harder to imagine, though. Preston and Wasserman both say that they would support using federal funds to pay rent and prevent evictions after the pandemic, but are not exactly sure how this would work.
Out of the shadows
Some tenants have paid rent with credit cards, payday loans, or by borrowing from friends and family. Chiu says local governments should address this “shadow debt” quickly.
Marin County might be a model. Our neighbor to the north has deployed a combination of philanthropy and community grants to aid renters who were initially not eligible for state and federal programs, and have taken on shadow debt as a result. The county also partnered with a community organization and a legal aid program to pay future rent so those renters can catch up on what they owe.
Leelee Thomas, deputy director of Marin County’s Housing and Federal Grants division, explains that the county can use public money too. “If somebody has paid their rent and stayed current but can document that it was borrowed,” she says, “then we can pay for up to three months at a time of back rent, and that is just out of the state and federal dollars.”
San Francisco has the wherewithal for a similar program, Tenants Together’s Singh says, and it’s a matter of political will. Preston, for his part, isn’t aware of any proposals to address shadow debt and does not have immediate plans for legislation.
Last resort
Goss says he expects the Board of Supervisors to continue pushing to make evictions “as difficult and unappetizing as possible” for landlords, including perhaps a permanent mandate that landlords must first work on rent relief with their tenants before triggering eviction proceedings.
Preston sees this as a positive: “I hope people realize that the sky doesn’t fall when you take eviction off the table. Eviction rates are much lower, the government has stepped up with rent relief, and it’s a horrible situation that led us here, but it’s a good thing that these eviction bans and rent relief programs have so dramatically reduced displacement.” (Although, as a recent high-profile case shows, even anti-eviction activists aren’t completely shielded.)
As elected officials continue to look for ways to tighten the rules — perhaps even “get to zero,” as Sup. Preston hopes — tenants can benefit more by knowing their rights, whether based on temporary programs like the state rent relief or permanent programs like the right to legal counsel. (For example, thousands of tenants who already applied for SF’s COVID rental assistance may need to reapply to the state, now that the city program has ended.)
A proposal introduced just last week by Sup. Aaron Peskin would require landlords to recognize and meet with tenant associations, the first legislation of its kind in the country.
Whatever the level of protection, there will always be room for improvement, says Singh of Tenants Together: “We’re never going to reach a perfect level of anti-displacement policy because the nature of displacement is always changing.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of evictions in San Francisco that are for nonpayment of rent.